Editorial: Special Issue on Dion Boucicault.

Jacobs-Jenkins radically transforms Boucicault by making the nineteenth-century playwright address the question from which the new drama springs, that is, what it means to be a "black playwright", operating in a historically racist tradition, afflicted by limiting expectations and ironic constraints, such as the anti-racist sensitivities of actors who identify as white. He has Queen Victoria tell Boucicault, 'You show us our Irish subjects in the manner that renders them the most beloved to us'.[13] For both Parker and Jacobs-Jenkins, Boucicault was partly made available through the investigations of others: that is, academic work mediated his transformation into new drama. Boucicault insisted that the play preached abolition, but his play also naturalised "race", sexualised it, and read blackness as a tragedy.[3] It was not, therefore, an obvious move for Jacobs-Jenkins to invoke and incorporate the play into his own work a century later. Parker's Boucicault play is also like I An Octoroon i in that it reflects on the present in the light of the past: the playwright recognised in the world of his predecessor the cynical materialism of his own "Thatcherite eighties".[7] Marilynn Richtarik contends that Parker was indirectly meditating on his own career, in which his commitment to Northern Irish subjects and his resistance to commercial compromise cost him a great deal. [Extracted from the article]